Archive for the 'Forschung' Category

Here’s our most recent call for a Bachelor Thesis. If you’re interested, holler.

The recent notion of a communicative constitution of organization (for an introduction, see Cooren et al., 2011) provides a unique theoretical backdrop for addressing organizational issues such as scaling up from the micro level of single communication events to the macro level of organizational structures and dynamics (Cooren and Fairhurst, 2008; Blaschke et al., 2012). So far, however, it stands to reason how the voice of a single individual becomes theme or topic of organizational communication (see Kornberger et al., 2006, for an reconceptualization of polyphonic organizations).

The Bachelor thesis applies a network perspective (Blaschke et al., 2012) to the structures and dynamics of a fictional organization based on J.J. Abrams’ television show Lost. The show tells the tale of 48 survivors who crashland on a remote island and now must fight to survive. The first season of Lost witnesses the unique setting of an organization’s birth, follows it through infancy, and watches it decline in the end. The Bachelor thesis identifies individual and collective themes and topics among lead characters in different stages of the organization’s life.

The main research question is: Is the voice of individuals always heard by organizations and how so?

Prerequisites: Applicants must be willing to watch the first season of Lost (provided by the advisor) and write up their thesis in English. The network analysis requires basic skills in R or Excel and willingness to learn a software for the display of network graphs (e.g., Gephi).

• Blaschke, S., Schoeneborn, D., & Seidl, D. (2012). Organizations as Networks of Communication Episodes: Turning the Network Perspective Inside Out. Organization Studies, 33(8).
• Cooren, F., & Fairhurst, G. T. (2008). Dislocation and Stabilization: How to Scale up From Interactions to Organization. In L. L. Putnam & A. M. Nicotera (Eds.), Building Theories of Organization: The Constitutive Role of Communication (pp. 117-151). New York: Routledge.
• Cooren, F., Kuhn, T. R., Cornelissen, J. P., & Clark, T. (2011). Communication, Organizing and Organization: An Overview and Introduction to the Special Issue. Organization Studies, 32(9), 1-22.
• Kornberger, M., Clegg, S. R., & Carter, C. (2006). Rethinking the Polyphonic Organization: Managing as Discursive Practice. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 22(1), 3-30.

Metaphors are an integral part of organization theory, just think all the organization-as metaphors: as machine, as organism, as brain (Morgan, 1986). Indeed, some metaphors are so common nowadays that we rarely recall that they are metaphors to begin with: organizational knowledge, learning, and memory, for example (Spender, 1996). Metaphors, in general, take a particular subject of a source domain — say, learning from mistakes as described in pedagogy — in order to highlight a corresponding feature of a target domain — organizational learning. That’s for a single metaphor, a single subject and feature. A more elaborate set of metaphors along with other rhetorical figures (irony, metonymy, etc.) is called a trope.

There is very little academic writing on organizational tropes (for a brief discussion, see Oswick, Keenoy, & Grant, 2002), for the most part a set of metaphors turns into theory (e.g., loosely coupled systems; Orton & Weick, 1990). A prime candidate for an organizational trope (maybe on the way to being a full-blown theory one day) is the communicative constitution of organization (for a recent review, turn to Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009) or, as we European put it now, organization as communication. Feel free to check out the latest videos (in German only, sorry) discussing the development of this organizational trope.

• Ashcraft, K. L., Kuhn, T. R., & Cooren, F. (2009). Constitutional Amendments: “Materializing” Organizational Communication. Academy of Management Annals, 3(1), 1-64.
• Morgan, G. (1986). Images of Organization. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE.
• Oswick, C., Keenoy, T., & Grant, D. (2002). Metaphor and Analogical Reasoning in Organization Theory: Beyond Orthodoxy. The Academy of Management Review, 27(2): 294-303.
• Spender, J. (1996). Organizational Knowledge, Learning and Memory: Three Concepts in Search of a Theory. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 9(1).
• Orton, J. D., & Weick, K. E. (1990). Loosely Coupled Systems: A Reconceptualization. Academy of Management Review, 15(2), 203-223.